The current Republican Congress has a duty to save
us from Bill Clinton's blunder in trying to lock America
into an expansion of NATO. The 105th Congress has
shown a notable lack of encouragement about confronting
Clinton on anything, but NATO would be a good place to
start.

All during the Cold War, NATO had a precise
mission: to prevent the Soviet Union from invading
Western Europe. NATO's job is finished; the Berlin Wall
is history; all hands should be awarded medals and
retired.

Since the fall of the Wall, NATO has been a bureaucracy in search of a new mission. A deafening drumbeat
is now demanding that NATO enlarge its membership by
admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic,
followed by Romania and Slovenia.

This provokes so many questions that haven't been
answered; many are probably unanswerable. Who will
we be protecting the NATO countries from? Why admit
some of the former Soviet satellites, but not others? How
much is it going to cost us? (Estimates range from $5 to
$61 billion.)

The biggest question is, why should Americans
commit to defend faraway European borders that have
been the locus of ethnic, nationalist and religious disputes
for hundreds of years? Make no mistake: NATO is a
life-and-death U.S. promise to go to war to protect any of
the other members.

None of Clinton's arguments makes sense. Democracy isn't threatened in the countries invited to join
NATO; it's only threatened in the countries that are
excluded. NATO expansion doesn't erase the dividing
line in Europe; it creates a new one.

Our best chance for a peaceful future is to encourage
Russia toward democracy and the free market. NATO
expansion will alienate Russia, empower the hard-line
Communists and ex-KGBers seeking a return to former
glory, and drive Russia toward an alliance with China.

Of course, Western Europe favors NATO expansion.
A U.S. presence assures a steady flow of U.S. cash into
their economies, and it is a useful "cover" for not letting
Eastern European countries into their common market,
which is called the European Union (EU).

Western Europeans are no longer worried about the
Red Army invading, but they are mighty worried about
Eastern Europeans invading with low-priced products and
emigrants willing to work for low wages. NATO is a
clever ploy; let the Eastern European countries into
NATO and don't feel guilty about excluding them from
the EU.

Bill Clinton announced his NATO commitment long
enough before the 1996 election to make sure that it was
known by the Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Croatian
voters whose conservatism might have led them to vote
for Bob Dole. That smacks of a Dick Morris ploy.

We are now seeing a powerful push to keep America
on an interventionist course despite the opposition of the
American people. It's called "global leadership," which
means that our armed services will serve as global
policemen and global social workers, while the U.S.
taxpayers will play global sugar daddy.

The interventionists are well aware that the United
Nations is no longer popular with the American people
because of impudent demands that we pay alleged back
"dues," as well as the embarrassments of Somalia, Haiti,
and Rwanda. The flap about Army Specialist Michael
New being court-martialed for refusing to wear a UN
uniform didn't help the UN's reputation, either.

That's why NATO was chosen, rather than the UN,
to sponsor the Bosnian expedition. Now, NATO expansion is promoted in order to legitimize the President's
ability to continue to engage American troops in foreign
quarrels without ever asking permission from Congress.
It's a sort of "back-door internationalism."

The chief advocate for NATO expansion is Strobe
Talbott, Clinton's personal foreign policy adviser and
Rhodes scholar roommate. The recipient of the 1993
Norman Cousin Global Governance Award, Talbott's
world view calls for birthing what he calls "the global
nation" to replace national sovereignty.

Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, is
described by Time Magazine as having a "passion for
American activism." Colin Powell relates in his autobiography that, when he was JCS Chairman, she said,
"What's the point of having this superb military that
you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

Clinton's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John
Shalikashvili, said on April 3, 1996: "I'm absolutely
convinced that America will not participate with military
forces in Bosnia after the conclusion of this year. I cannot
imagine circumstances changing in such a way that we
would remain in Bosnia."

Since we are now in the ninth month after "the conclusion" of the year he was talking about, we wonder
whether Shalikashvili's military foresight is absolutely
unreliable, or he is just one of those who thinks that it's
no big deal to keep Americans in perpetual "peacekeeping" expeditions.

Since NATO expansion is a treaty that will require
Senate ratification, the interventionists are trying to line
up Republican support through a new front called New
Atlantic Initiative. Its second annual conference was held
in Phoenix on May 16-18 in order to coopt one of the
Senate's rising conservative stars, Jon Kyl, as a featured
speaker in his home state.

I recently revisited Independence Hall, the cradle of
our republic where the Declaration of Independence was
signed and the United States Constitution was written.
Something new has been added since the last time I saw
it: a large bronze plaque with a peculiar inscription under
an unidentified insignia.

(Select above picture for larger view)

"Through the collective recognition of the community
of nations expressed within the principles of the convention
concerning protection of the world cultural and natural
heritage, Independence Hall has been designated a World
Heritage Site and joins a select list of protected areas
around the world whose outstanding natural and cultural
resources form the common inheritance of all mankind."

Whew! Where did all that mumbo-jumbo come from?
Obviously not from American history or our founding
documents. "Common inheritance of all mankind"? No
way. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution
are both uniquely American, written by identifiable
Founding Fathers on American soil at known points in
time.

Independence Hall "joins a select list of protected
areas around the world"? Who decided that Independence Hall should "join" anything? It is a unique American
treasure. And who is protecting these "protected areas"?
"Collective recognition of the community of nations"?
It's obvious that all those foreign nations don't agree with
our American Declaration or Constitution or the principles
therein.

Since it is impossible to relive history and give the
"collective" or the "community of nations" any ownership
in the historic events that made Independence Hall an
American shrine, we can only deduce that some international entity is asserting a vested interest in the building.
Who authorized that?

After all, it would have been a nice accolade and not
worthy of particular comment if the Independence Hall
plaque merely said, "The United Nations honors the
cradle of American freedom, the inspired words of the
Declaration of Independence, and the genius of the United
States Constitution that has nourished liberty in America
for more than two centuries." But it didn't.

We now find that at least 20 pieces of American
property have been designated as "World Heritage Sites"
and so identified with markers. These include Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, the Grand Canyon,
Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello, and, believe it or
not, the Statue of Liberty. All of these markings took
place without any publicity, without the American people
knowing what was going on.

The designation of these World Heritage Sites was
authorized by the World Heritage Convention, a treaty
signed by President Richard Nixon and ratified in 1973.
The World Heritage Program is carried out by UNESCO,
to which the United States doesn't even belong. President Ronald Reagan pulled us out of UNESCO because
it was totally corrupt.

The UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Program was
created in 1970. The United States joined in 1974 when
our State Department signed a memorandum of understanding (not a treaty) to put us in the Biosphere Program and
pledge that the United States will adhere to the Biosphere
conditions and limitations laid down by UNESCO. Paragraph 44 of the World Heritage Operational Guidelines states that "natural" Heritage Sites (as contrasted to
"cultural") can be interchanged with "core reserves" of
the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Program. These
core protected areas are planned to be surrounded by
highly regulated buffer zones, all for the sake of
"biodiversity."

At a conference in Spain in 1995 that culminated in
the Seville Strategy, the Biosphere Program underwent a
radical change in purpose. The first goal of the Seville
Strategy for Biosphere Reserves is to "promote biosphere
reserves as a means of implementing the goals of the
Convention on Biological Diversity."

U.S. State Department representatives agreed to this
new framework of UNESCO-designated guidelines and
objectives for the Man and Biosphere Program. So, even
though the United States doesn't belong to UNESCO, and
even though the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the
Biodiversity Treaty, the United States is marching right
ahead with UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Program.

Starting with Yellowstone National Park in 1979,
UNESCO has designated 47 Biosphere Reserves in the
United States covering 50 million acres. In order to
designate sites and spheres under either of these
UNESCO programs, the United States must agree to
manage these lands according to international dictates and
objectives.

That's another way of saying that the United States
has agreed to limit our sovereign power to manage our
own lands any way we want in pursuit of our own national interests. The Clinton Administration's designation
of Yellowstone Park as a World Heritage Site "in danger"
has already been used to shut down a gold mine near (not
even in) Yellowstone.

The UN/UNESCO types have made no secret of their
goals. Their next step is their Wildlands Project, a plan
to designate one half of the United States as "protected
areas or areas where special measures need to be taken to
conserve biological diversity."

Americans don't need or want any UN/UNESCO
bureaucrats telling us how to "protect" our own land. We
can jolly well handle our own protection.

Finally, the U.S. Senate is starting to assert itself. By
passing the Byrd-Hagel Resolution 95 to 0 on July 25, it
served notice on President Clinton that the Senate is not
going to be a party to reducing the standard of living of
Americans in order to accommodate international agreements, third-world envy, or wacko environmentalists.

The Senate resolution, of course, wasn't that flamboyant, but it was firm and stern. The Byrd-Hagel resolution
warned Clinton not to sign, because the Senate won't
ratify, the treaty he is planning to sign in Kyoto, Japan in
December to require the United States, but not most of
the rest of the world, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The road to Kyoto began at the Earth Summit in Rio
de Janeiro in 1992 when our government signed the
Framework Convention on Global Climate Change, which
was then ratified by the Senate in 1993. It called for the
economically developed countries to take "voluntary
actions" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (carbon
dioxide, methane and nitrogen oxides) to their 1990 levels
by the year 2000.

This is one more example of how government programs called "voluntary" soon morph into mandates. The
Clinton Administration's plan is to turn the voluntary
goals into "legally binding commitments" to be achieved
by 2010.

The only realistic way to reduce emissions to a 1990
level is to raise energy costs through taxes, i.e., add 60
cents a gallon to gasoline, double home heating oil costs,
and raise electric rates 30 percent. Of course, the liberals
always want higher taxes.

The enormity of this goal is exceeded only by its
inequity. The treaty would bind the United States to
reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 10 to 20 percent
below our 1990 levels, while Western Europe would be
able to evade reductions by averaging among the EU
countries and because most of their energy is produced by
nuclear plants (not affected by the treaty). The 130
developing nations, including China and Mexico, would
have no limitations at all!

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that U.S.
fossil-fuel-burning plants would move out of the United
States to countries where there are no such restrictions.
Whole industries and a million to a million and a half U.S.
jobs would move overseas, making us a non-industrialized nation.

The Byrd-Hagel resolution provides, as a separate
test, that any new treaty should be opposed if it "results
in serious harm to the United States economy." The
Clinton Administration is trying to finesse the treaty's
harm by floating a plan for the "international trading of
emissions credits."

This is a scheme to allow rich nations that can't stay
within their limits to "buy" pollution permits from poor
countries. That is international hocus-pocus for forcing
U.S. companies to finance their foreign competitors. Of
course, it would require another world regulatory bureaucracy.

The reason why we are involved in these self-destructive negotiations in the first place is widespread propaganda that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels (oil,
coal, gas) are making a hole in the ozone and causing
"global warming." But there isn't a scientific consensus
that there is global warming other than natural temperature fluctuations.

Furthermore, there isn't a scientific consensus that
global warming, if it does exist, is a big problem, or that
humans caused it, or that government should act now to
remedy it. Most of the alleged global warming occurred
before 1940, before the widespread use of automobiles
which are the chief cause of carbon dioxide emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions in the developing countries
exempted by the Kyoto treaty, such as China, Mexico,
India, Brazil, South Korea, and Singapore, are increasing
rapidly. They are expected to surpass U.S. emissions by
2015.

Let's be clear about what this Kyoto treaty is designed to do. It would require us to deliberately reduce
our energy consumption by one-fourth, causing a devastating effect on our standard of living and the ability of a
million plus U.S. wage-earners to support their families,
all on the basis of climate predictions that are at best
controversial and at worst no more reliable than the
weatherman's guess of how much snow will fall next
winter.

There must be an agenda behind this irrational plan.
Let's try a multiple-choice question. Is the hidden agenda
of the Kyoto treaty (a) to promote the presidential candidacy of Al Gore, who has staked his political future on a
platform of prioritizing the planet above people, or (b) to
redistribute U.S. wealth and jobs to foreign countries
because the Clintonian liberals support income redistribution, or (c) to con the American people into accepting
increased federal taxes, regulations and even rationing?

Or, is the answer (d) to reduce our standard of living
to the level of the rest of the world because other countries are envious of our automobiles and our single-family
dwellings that are heated in the winter and cooled in the
summer, or (e) to save face for the social scientists who
have been predicting climate catastrophe, or (f) to provide
politically correct "cover" for the multinationals that want
to move their plants to low-labor-cost Asian countries, or
(g) all of the above?

It looks as though American taxpayers may be
suckered into paying an additional $819 million to the
United Nations on the UN's promise to "reform." Do you
think the UN is going to reform itself after getting more
U.S. handouts disguised as "dues"? If so, I have a good
bridge I'd like to sell you.

Laying off a few thousand unnecessary hangers-on at
the over-staffed New York City headquarters won't cause
the UN to miss a beat in its march toward its global goals.
Replacing Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General
with Kofi Annan didn't accomplish anything except to
provide the UN with a smoother salesman for world
government, now called "global governance."

The executive director of Annan's "UN Reform
Program" is Maurice Strong, a David Rockefeller protege
and a Canadian. His meteoric career has led him through
many exotic positions: secretary general of the 1972
Earth Summit in Stockholm, director of the International
Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), senior
adviser to the World Bank president, and secretary
general of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro,
which laid out the agenda for global governance.

The Rio Earth Summit produced the Framework
Convention on Climate Change to reduce greenhouse
emissions (ratified in 1992, and scheduled to be morphed
in Kyoto, Japan in December from voluntary into compulsory restrictions on U.S. energy consumption), the
Convention on Biological Diversity (which the Senate
refused to ratify, but which the Clinton Administration is
implementing anyway through a variety of programs such
as Ecosystem Management and UNESCO's Man and the
Biosphere Program), and two agreements signed by
President Bush called Agenda 21 and the Sustainable
Development Commission (which establish the framework to control all human activity and property in order
to protect the environment).

Clinton's Council on Sustainable Development is the
outgrowth of these latter two agreements. This Council
uses global warming, ozone depletion, and worries about
biodiversity to rationalize plans to take over private
property, institute federal land-use control, and convert
enormous U.S. areas into wilderness.

The Council's 1996 report officiously proclaims on its
cover that it represents "A New Consensus" on Al Gore-style gobbledegook about global interdependence. Of
course, there is no such consensus in America, and none
of the report's conclusions about "sustainable development" has ever passed through America's institutions of
self-government or free market.

They are not supposed to. Decision-making about
human behavior, land ownership and use, and our economic future are now supposed to be the result of "collaborative approaches" with as yet unidentified persons,
using the power of government "to convene and facilitate,
. . . setting goals, creating incentives, monitoring performance."

That's far removed from full disclosure and American
processes of self-government, but we are now in the
global marketplace where decisions about our ecosystems
are made by "consensus" rather than elections. That's
how Clinton thought he could get by with his 1996 grab
for control over all U.S. rivers through his American
Heritage Rivers Initiative.

Kofi Annan's appointee Maurice Strong has emerged
as the human link in the intricate network of UN agencies
seeking global control. He was a member of the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance, whose 1995
report, "Our Global Neighborhood," recommended
removing U.S. veto power in the Security Council,
creating an Economic Security Council to oversee the
world's economy, changing the World Bank into a central
bank like the Federal Reserve, establishing an international court superior to U.S. courts, creating a permanent
UN standing army while disarming all nations and individuals, establishing a global taxation system, giving the UN
control over the "global commons" (the air, the oceans
and outer space), and creating a parliamentary body of
"civil society" made up of private pressure groups called
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

An acknowledged genius at organizational networking, Maurice Strong is the kingpin of the NGOs, which he
has taught how to access foundation funds and manipulate
"consensus" at UN conferences. He developed this
technique in the 1970s by bringing NGOs into the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN),
where now some 700 NGOs control the agenda even
though the IUCN membership includes 74 governments
and 104 government agencies.

U.S. members of the IUCN not only include government agencies such as the Environmental Protection
Agency, but also private lobbying groups such as the
Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, Nature
Conservancy, and the National Wildlife Federation. The
IUCN substantially wrote the treaties and agreements that
came out of the Rio Earth Summit, which Maurice Strong
chaired.

Tightening the screws of world governance is the kind
of "reform" that the executive director of the "UN Reform
Program" is seeking. And now he's going to do it with
American taxpayers' money.

Phyllis Schlafly is the author of 16 books, including five
books on national defense and foreign policy: The Gravediggers (1964), Strike From Space (1965), and The Betrayers
(1968) covering the McNamara years, and Kissinger on the
Couch (1975) and Ambush at Vladivostok (1976) covering the
Kissinger years. Her other books include A Choice Not an
Echo (1964), The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), and
First Reader (1994). An attorney, she was a member of the
Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, by appointment of President Reagan (1985-91). She is
the president of Eagle Forum and has been writing the Phyllis
Schlafly Report monthly since 1967.

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